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1703 points danrocks | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.215s | source

Recently I interviewed with Stripe for an engineering MoM (Manager of Managers) for one of their teams. I interview regularly, so I am used to many types of processes, feedback mechanisms, and so on. I won't go into details about the questions because there's nothing special about them, but I wanted to share some details of my experience for people thinking of interviewing there.

1) About 35-40% of the interviewers started their questioning by saying "I will only need 20 minutes for this", while emphasizing it is an important leadership position that they are hiring for. So 20 minutes is all needed to identify "important, critical leaders"? What a strange thing to say - also a GREAT way to make candidates feel important and wanted!

2) There is significant shuffling of interviewers and schedules. One almost has to be on-call to be able to react quickly.

3) For an engineering manager position, I only interviewed with only technical person. To me it hints that Engineering MoM is not a very technical position.

4) Of all the people I spoke to, the hiring manager was the one I spoke the least with. The phone screen was one of the "I only need 20 minutes for this" calls. The other one was quite amusing, and is described below.

5) After the loop was done, the recruiter called me to congratulate me on passing, and started discussing details of the offer, including sending me a document described the equity program. Recruiter mentioned that the hiring manager would be calling me to discuss the position next.

6) SURPRISE INTERVIEW! I get a call from the hiring manager, he congratulates me on passing the loop, then as I prepare to ask questions about the role, he again says "I need to ask you two questions and need 20 minutes for this". Then proceeds to ask two random questions about platforms and process enforcement, then hangs up the call after I answer. Tells me he'd be calling in a week to discuss the position.

7) I get asked for references.

8) After passing the loop, have the recruiter discuss some details of the offer, have the hiring manager tell me they'd be calling me after a week, I get ghosted for about 3.5 weeks. References are contacted and feedback is confirmed positive.

9) I ping the recruiter to see when the offer is coming - it's not coming. They chose another candidate. I am fine with it, even after being offered verbally, but the ghosting part after wasting so much of my time seems almost intentional.

10) I call up a senior leader in the office I applied to, an acquaintance of mine. His answer: "don't come. It's a mess and a revolving door of people". I was shocked with the response.

11) I get called by the recruiter saying that another director saw my feedback and is very interested in talking to me and do an interview loop.

Guess I'm not joining, then.

I am ok with passing loops, being rejected, I've seen it all. But being ghosted after acceptance is a first. What a bizarre place this is.

1. choppaface ◴[] No.29388850[source]
Companies employ the "shotgun" approach to hiring because there is essentially no existing feedback mechanism for panels to see the consequences of their decisions. Sometimes posts like this OP or some Glassdoor review will bubble up, but then the company acts on the defensive and the people who actually screwed up likely won't even ever know what happened.

Are you an IC doing tech screens? An EM or Director doing loops like those in the OP? How much feedback have you gotten in the past 2 years about the success (or lack thereof) of the candidates you interviewed, whether you hired them or not? (Here "success" is how they aligned to your evaluation-- could be they had _financial_ success or _career_ success choosing some other job).

EMs will sometimes try to keep tabs on "false negatives," and at the Director / VP Level there's more formal analytical effort (though a lot of it is trying to hit quotas, even if those quotas are bloated or poorly defined). But this aggregate information very rarely bubbles down to the panel and in particular the individuals who interacted with the candidate.

Why keep so many people in the dark? For one thing, if results were disseminated, then salaries / offers would leak too, and then the engineering org becomes much more expensive. (Ironically, the employee stock pool is tiny, and engineering salaries are often not the biggest cost to a Co. The issue here is more about the C-levels having so little understanding of the job market. That's why Steve Jobs wanted a no-poach-- he had no idea what his coveted Safari employees actually did).

Moreover, panels suck. They get stuff wrong all the time. I have never been on a panel that has not moved the goalposts at least 3-4 times between candidates as the panel tries to figure out what the panel even really wants. If ICs and the panel got to know about the outcomes of their actions, they're going to question what happened. And the higher-ups don't want to spend time having that debate.

How can we prevent outcomes like those illustrated in the OP?

If you're a recruiter, stop shotgunning candidates. Try to figure out what your client really wants, and poke half the passives you might otherwise. For actives, give _useful_ feedback, even if it's just verbally. If bombing one leetcode is all it takes relative to the rest of the pool, that can be good for a junior engineer to know.

If you're an IC doing interview loops, do a quarterly review of the candidates you interviewed and the panels you were on. Insist to your manager that you want to do this as part of your 1:1s. Think critically about the loops and discuss with others.

If you're a Director / VP / C-level, stop treating candidates like toys. You earn outsized compensation because you're supposed to be a force multiplier-- you're supposed to assemble an amazing team. If you fell into a goldmine of an opportunity, be extra generous to candidates. You're going to build a good team out of luck, not your own ability, and you'll thank yourself later for not being a sore winner. If your funnel sucks (e.g. you're a tiny unknown start-up), expect to need to improvise, and don't blame candidates for your own bad luck.